Eddie Glaude, Jr., holds a mirror up to America. Look, he tells us, look! How often I have heard him on television, invited to the camera by Nicolle Wallace to lament another American tragedy and sin: racist murders, the shooting deaths of mere babies, the abuse of immigrant children, the bigotry of the president. Do not say that this is not us, he demands. This is us. This is America. The italics are his. Unless and until we, we white Americans, acknowledge and absorb that truth, he tells us, we cannot and never will move past it.
Glaude’s new book, America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, is that mirror, reflecting the worst of our reality in sharp detail. He uses the moment of the nation’s already spoiled 250th anniversary to look back on earlier birthdays, on earlier assertions of an American ideal that were always in fact claims to a white America. Those claims have met their lowest ebb in Donald Trump and his klan’s brazen denials of the nation’s racism and any remedies. Diversity is as much as illegal. Racism is now the de facto law of the land.
His book is a stunning, damning indictment and conviction of our nation. I cannot recommend it more highly. Best yet, I commend you to listen to the audiobook, read by Glaude. More than once over the years, at the beginning of a Princeton term, I have wandered through the downstairs stacks in my favorite bookstore, Labyrinth, to see what texts are being assigned in the classrooms across the street. I always stop at the shelves filled with those selected by Prof. Glaude, wishing I could sit in his class and learn. To hear him read this book is to witness his teaching.
While I was listening to the book, I joined Julie Roginsky and Michelle Kinney for our every-Friday lament about the state of news and media in the podcast we call Breaking the News. What was most broken last week was, of course, CBS. As we were cursing the murder of 60 Minutes at the hands of Bari Weiss and the Ellisons, Michelle said something most wise: that sometimes, rather than wishing to recapture what is lost, we must simply mourn it.
Yes, 60 Minutes is the dead show walking. CBS News is already dead. CNN is likely doomed. The Washington Post might as well be buried. The New York Times fails us constantly in the face of fascism. Sinclair is brainwashing towns across the nation, where hedge funds have ruined most every newspaper. Ultimately, I contend, it is mass media that is dead and doesn’t know it. I no longer think it is worthwhile to wonder how to fix it. Instead, I mourn it and ask what will replace it.
In this context, I brought up Glaude’s book and said that he forces me to mourn not an America that was but an America that never was: a fantasy of the nation.
My grandparents were, frankly racist. And so I was proud of my parents for raising my sister and me to recognize and reject their way of thinking. But what my parents wanted to replace it with in my mind was the American myth of the melting pot. It was too many years later that I saw the inherent falacy in the contention that harmony would come at the expense of identity and history, as if we in power, we white Americans, would ever admit others into our pot of privilege. To be colorblind, as was the aspiration of the time, was to be blind to history, to the effects of racism and the benefits of our own birth.
Just as I see that in my own field, to which I have devoted fifty years of my life, it is fruitless and ultimately delusional to think there ever was something better to return to, so I understand that an America of principles can only be built anew, following the full realization of what it was and still is. Each must be replaced.
What Glaude forces his readers to do is to face the reality of racist America, the crusade to declare the U.S.A. a white nation and to exclude all others. He calls us to a radical new birth. It is brilliantly written, forceful in its poetry, unflinching in its honesty, demanding in its teaching.
